There are some genuine scares, some gross-out moments and some heartfelt scenes between Julia and Lucas. The atmosphere is so thick you can touch it. This is a good movie and an interesting concept. But it’s not any fun at all.

No one is going to mistake “Road House” for a masterpiece, but it succeeds far better at being what the original film set out to be.

Thanks to its cast, The Grand Seduction turns out to be, if not exactly groundbreaking, at least agreeable, comfortable fun.

Adult Beginners is funny and warm and sweet enough without overdoing it. Again, it's not groundbreaking, but it shakes things up a little.

Bright Days Ahead offers an interesting twist on the May-December romance.

Schull's quietly commanding performance is a stunning piece of acting, in which the character seems to reveal new layers every time she's on screen.

Ficarra and Requa never quite strike a successful balance between comedy and drama, making the whole thing feel a bit off.

Chemical Hearts is sad, dark and depending on how much heartbreak you can take, almost too depressing at times. But it definitely provides something different in the teenage romance genre — except that something different may make you miss the days of cheesy high school rom-coms by the end.

Whether Army of the Dead is any good isn’t really an issue. It’s more whether it sets out to do what Snyder intends for it to do. If he intended it to be an over-the-top exercise in zombie mayhem sprinkled with the occasional human emotion, he succeeded. The nice part is that this time he has actually managed to make it fun along the way.

Director Susanna White keeps things low-key and absorbing, as the action moves from Marrakesh to London to Paris to Switzerland.

If there is a common thread, it's that for all these people life is not a passive activity. They live their lives, largely in the ways they've wanted to, and don't just wait around to see what's next.

It’s not trying to make a grand statement about the world, at least not any more than movies like this do... But it is trying to scare you, and it does.

Where this falls on your personal line between funny and abusive may vary. Either way, what makes the comedy work is that Bateman doesn't relent. Guy is, simply, a loathsome person.

The commercials were funny and unexpected. The movie, not so much, although there are some solid laughs.

It presents Perry as a likable, hard-working artist, someone you root for, even if she's not on your iPod.

Close's performance is a study in repression -- too much so, really.

Fothergill and Linfield capture plenty of humor and drama.

This won't be the best movie audiences will ever see, but at least it's fun to watch with pretty visuals and upbeat songs.

Southpaw is all about the fist. There’s no delicate footwork here, no lingering grace notes. It’s a film played entirely in power chords.

The result is too well-meaning and sincere to truly dislike, but too frictionless and manufactured to do right by the complicated scenario.

Credit returning director Christopher Landon and screenwriter Scott Lobdell (Landon co-writes this time) with trying something different with the story. Blame them for not doing something better.

Burton reins in his worst impulses, bad habits that he’s been cultivating for over a decade, to make a wickedly dark children’s movie that is, finally, blessedly, fun to look at.

It's a tired genre, one that would be greatly improved if, ironically, far younger actors showed the energy and command these two old hands do.

The film’s focus is too easily distracted by celebrity and turns less documentary and more fawning love letter to an industry already in love with itself.

There is nothing about Evil Dead as groundbreaking as Raimi’s films (particularly the first two). But it’s smarter and better done than a lot of what’s come since those movies were made, which is to say there is at least some thought behind the killings.

Téchiné's fidelity to the facts delivers a disappointing denouement to an intriguing character study.

Between Valkyrie ruling New Asgard and Jane Foster vanquishing shadow monsters as Mighty Thor, it seems early on as if the women would lead the way in “Love and Thunder.” It helps that, throughout, Thor is more often than not the butt of the joke.

In the final minutes, the characters make several choices that defy logic, leaving the audience to wonder what happened to the savvy operators presented in the early parts of the film.